Postgraduate Scientific Writing Skills Development

Description

Postgraduate students are expected to produce writing that is suitable for publication in scientific journals. This requires them to assimilate new academic cultures and standards very quickly and to write in new and challenging ways. Effective communication of scientific results and ideas is vital both for professional advancement and relationships with research supervisors, yet it is an area where both students and staff acknowledge lack of confidence and proficiency. I plan to introduce an evaluative pilot scientific writing skills programme for all first year PhD students entering the Department of Biology in order to determine whether this additional personalized support provides lasting benefits in terms of improving scientific writing.

Outcomes

Enrolment to this pilot project was dependent on the number of students entering the Department of Biology.  Initially (October 2009) four students undertook the programme.  Unlike in former years, in 2009 all were home/EU students.  One additional student was subsequently processed (January 2010).  The language skills of this group of students were very good and there was no opportunity to try the programme on students with less familiarity with English (although this was not the focus of the programme).  Beyond language skills, the performance of the students was generally excellent in terms of scientific literacy. The original plan was to go though fixed series of five exercises.  Because of the performance of the students and the need for scalability (see below), one major outcome of the project was the decision to reduce the programme to three exercises, with the option of a voluntary follow-up for students/supervisors who would like further support.  The reason for this decision was based on student feedback, which showed that they felt the programme to be repetitive, and to make the fixed programme more diagnostic in order to improve the capacity to triage individuals who require additional writing support. Exercises three and four involving literature searches proved to be problematic for a number of reasons. By straying away from the focus on student writing and introducing other skills such as literature searching, some of the focus on writing was lost. In the case of one student, it proved difficult to find enough highly relevant papers related to their research topic. When the students performed their own literature search, they tended to select review articles to write about, which were far harder to critique than original research articles. Finally, these two exercises were seen as being repetitive, and made the overall length of the programme rather too long for students who could write well at the outset.  Hence, the revised programme consist of the following three exercises, with the fortnightly timing cycle as described above.

Revision of the programme:
Exercise 1:  Correct a short anonymous passage (~500 words) extracted from the professional literature (a published paper relevant to their research topic) which contained introduced errors that students needed to identify, explain and correct.
Exercise 2:  Produce a 500 word synopsis of an assigned published research paper relevant to the student's research topic which describes the background behind the paper, a summary of how the research was conducted and the main findings.
Exercise 3:  Produce a summary document similar to a first year PhD report of between 500-1000 words describing their research topic and planned experiments.

When the revised scheme was trialled with the additional student who entered in January 2010, the outcome was improved without any obvious loss of quality. In spite of these initial problems, feedback about the programme from both students, and crucially, supervisors, was very good. Some time savings may be made by use of a project management site such as Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com), Huddle (www.huddle.net), or PBWorks (http://pbworks.com) to administer the programme.  While this would help with scalability for a larger number of students, it would not significantly reduce the academic time input required for such a programme to be successful. Another possibility for scalability is to consider peer assessment of writing. However, reports in the literature suggest that peer assessment is unpopular with postgraduate students, time consuming and potentially unreliable (Topping, K.J., Smith, E.F, Swanson, I. and Elliot, A. (2000) Formative Peer Assessment of Academic Writing Between Postgraduate Students. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 25 (2), 149–169). Certainly, peer assessment moves away from the original conception of students benefiting from intensive face to face contact with an experienced academic writing tutor. Perhaps the most problematic issue is how to support students who are identified with the potential to benefit from further support for their writing.

Future Work

The pilot programme was well received and it has been agreed that the revised version will operate in the Department of Biology in future years. A report describing this project and the outcomes was subsequently presented to the local Research Degrees Committee with a recommendation that it be considered for more widespread adoption. After discussion, the Committee decided to recommend the revised programme as best practice, but not to formally adopt such a scheme on a more widespread basis because of the resource implications. The issue of time, in particular identifying and finding staff time for nominated postgraduate writing tutors, is clearly the major issue with this approach to skills development. Even the revised programme is more expensive in terms of time than a single taught session or series of purely online writing exercises.  In reality, investment of time in student writing skills at an early stage will likely return interest later during the preparation of a thesis and research publications.  It took approximately 30 minutes per student per week to run the project, including reading, correction, meeting with students (one 30 minute meeting per fortnight) and administration (email, record keeping, evaluation), plus the time for preparing materials relevant to each student. This problem has been minimized by the revised programme which turns the approach into more of a diagnostic tool.

Links

Alan is an extensive blogger and frequently discusses the findings and themes of the project:
www.citeulike.org/user/AJCann/tag/writing

http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2009/09/postgraduate-scientific-writing.html http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/Writing

Have you undertaken anything similar with postgraduate students in your department or school? Do you have any comments about Alan's project? Get in touch with Alan through his blog at http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com or via Twitter at http://twitter.com/AJCann

Other resources of interest:

Write Now a CETL devoted to the act of writing and helping to build confident writers within a discipline. www.writenow.ac.uk/

An approach of a Dissertation (USA) Writing group was blogged about at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/starting-a-dissertation-writing-group-in-a-writing-center/25794